nd must on every
occasion do that which on the whole seems best to you at any given time,
no matter whether you are right or wrong in choosing it. Your mind will
be a balance for considerations, and your action will go with the heavier
scale. How it shall fall will depend upon the kind of scales which you
may have drawn at birth, the bias which they will have obtained by use,
and the weight of the immediate considerations. If the scales were good
to start with, and if they have not been outrageously tampered with in
childhood, and if the combinations into which you enter are average ones,
you may come off well; but there are too many "ifs" in this, and with the
failure of any one of them your misery is assured. Reflect on this, and
remember that should the ill come upon you, you will have yourself to
thank, for it is your own choice to be born, and there is no compulsion
in the matter.

"Not that we deny the existence of pleasures among mankind; there is a
certain show of sundry phases of contentment which may even amount to
very considerable happiness; but mark how they are distributed over a
man's life, belonging, all the keenest of them, to the fore part, and few
indeed to the after. Can there be any pleasure worth purchasing with the
miseries of a decrepit age? If you are good, strong, and handsome, you
have a fine fortune indeed at twenty, but how much of it will be left at
sixty? For you must live on your capital; there is no investing your
powers so that you may get a small annuity of life for ever: you must eat
up your principal bit by bit and be tortured by seeing it grow
continually smaller and smaller, even though you happen to escape being
rudely robbed of it by crime or casualty. Remember, too, that there
never yet was a man of forty who would not come back into the world of
the unborn if he could do so with decency and honour. Being in the
world, he will as a general rule stay till he is forced to go; but do you
think that he would consent to be born again, and re-live his life, if he
had the offer of doing so? Do not think it. If he could so alter the
past as that he should never have come into being at all, do you not
think that he would do it very gladly? What was it that one of their own
poets meant, if it was not this, when he cried out upon the day in which
he was born, and the night in which it was said there is a man child
conceived? 'For now,' he says, 'I should have lain still and bee